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 | Find ways to use one of the more useful tools in PowerPoint 2013 – the Eye Dropper tool. The tool allows you to pick up any color on any object within or outside the presentation. You can use the tool to color text, outline, object, background or anything that can be assigned a color. So, the tool helps your slides to maintain design consistency with your corporate logos and theme colors easily.Let us see how to use the tool and explore some applications of the tool. |
Let us see how to use the tool and explore some applications of the tool.
Picking the color of shape and outline:
Let us take a sample title slide as shown below:
As you can observe in the slide, the title font was picked from the logo that looks like this:
Logo with colors
Since we picked the title font from the logo, why not pick the fill color of the bar from the cardboard box?
Click on the background bar and go to Shape Fill. When you click on the ‘Shape fill’ button, a drop down menu appears.
Click on the ‘Eye Dropper tool’ to get a cursor that looks like this:
When you hover the cursor over any color within the slide, the square shows the color picked, the RGB values of the color and the name of the color.
Let us hover the cursor over the cardboard in the logo. Once we like the color displayed we can click to apply the color to the background bar (the shape we wanted to fill color).
We can use the same technique to fill the color of the outline with the darker color of the cardboard. The result will be as follows:
After applying picked colors
The color theme seems to be in harmony with the logo and the design looks subtle and professional.
Picking the color by browsing the net:
Sometimes, for your slides you may want to use colors you find on a website. For example, while browsing through a wiki article on packaging, we came across the following page. The colors on a box caught our fancy:
Example Image from Wiki
We thought of filling our text box with the lemon yellow color and our text with dark green color as seen on the packing of a medicine box. Here is how we went about it:
We clicked on the ‘Restore down’ button on the top right corner of PowerPoint ribbon:
This allowed us to shrink the PowerPoint window slightly, to show the website hiding behind:
We then clicked on the text box and went to shape fill option. Picked the Eye dropper tool. This time we clicked the cursor on the slide and while holding the mouse click – we hovered over the lemon yellow color on the medicine box.
When we picked the right color we released the mouse click to fill the text box with the color. We filled the text font with dark green color using the same technique. The result was as follows:
Thus, you can use Eye dropper tool to pick any color within or outside the presentation.
Examples of using the Eye Dropper Tool
Here are some examples of how we have used the Eye Dropper tool to create presentation slides:
You can pick color from any type of image – PNG, JPG or vector images. The the example below variation of the color from the vector image has been used to create the design behind the text boxes.
Source: Opening slides from Flat Design pack
In the example below, the green color from the image has been picked up and used to create transparent text boxes. This type of layout is usually used to display product features.
Source: Image showcase from Flat Design Pack
In this example below the colors from the background image were picked up to use as backgrounds for the text. This ensures that the text is readable but the image is not overwhelmed by the semi-transparent text boxes.
Source: Opening slides from Flat Design pack
Another way to impress your audience:
Using the right colors in a presentation is one way to impress your audience. Another way to impress your business audience is to use professional quality graphics and diagrams for your business slides.
However, it takes a lot of time and effort to create high quality graphics and diagrams from scratch. If you are a busy business presenter, you may not be able to afford the time it takes to build and polish your graphics to the extent you like.
That is why we came up with our ‘Flat Design Templates pack for PowerPoint’. The pack has over 750 templates and all the templates in the collection are 100% editable. Just choose the template that matches your thought and replace the sample text with your own text. Your business slides get ready in no time.
The templates showcased in this article are taken from the same pack.
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Learn more about Flat design and when to use it here.